Why did only 1% of people see old Naxx in vanilla? Is it that 99% of players were directly barred from entering? No.

There was an attunement, and that attunement could be either a time sink or a gold sink. I'd done it both ways. Neither was enough to explain 99% rejection.

Was it too hard? Hm... Well let's see, we could look at the new Naxx, which is in many ways the same, and see how that went. The 99% appears to be flipped, without the fights being totally gutted. But... gear requirements.

Aha, here we go now. What time does it take to get the needed frost resistance and general gear levels for that raid? That's a tricky question, due to being a long time ago and no longer accessible. I may or may not be still mad about this. Flip a coin.

It's the linear progression that did it. It is theoretically possible that Naxx could have been a walk in the park: zone in with the right gear level and Kel'Thuzad falls over dead and Atiesh is placed in the bags of one random caster, and under these conditions it would still only be completed by 1% of players.

It is Ahn'Qiraj that mattered. And just how many people saw that? I have no clue, because it was more than 1%, and so not as fun of a number to throw around when complaining about inaccessible raids. But how many were in AQ? I already asked that. Why less than 100%?

I blame BWL. And why do I blame BWL? Because it is MC's fault! Now why did no one do MC? I blame warriors. Not for any particular reason, but just because I hated warriors back in vanilla, because at least 99% of them were total douchebags.

As the hippies would say: "It's the system, man. And then I'd tell them to get a damn haircut and they'd call me a hypocrite and they would be right.

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It was linear progression (which I prefer) AND many guilds "thinking" they had to go to AQ40 first because "Naxx is too hard".This is exactly what happened on my server. We were maybe 10-15 serious (were there any other?) 40man raidguilds at the time, competing against each other. Only 3 or 4 of us decided to do Naxx first after Neffie or at least do both Naxx and AQ both to see what we get out of each.

My guild was among them - frankly because AQ had teh nasty bugz and Naxx looked friggin' awesome. Also: nobody (not the important people, anyway) cared for Tier 2.5, eww.

So, is the system broken or the people? sometimes I am not sure. of course vanilla raiding was more exclusive to begin with, but then let's not forget the game was NEW, raiding was NEW, guild management was NEW! who can say how things would have developed, without Blizzard stepping in and taking away progression, attunements, res-gear grinds etc. etc.... maybe the average raider would actually have experienced more content in the long run, because the system allowed for no skipping. they've chosen one road, we'll never know how the other might have turned out.

We felt we couldn't take on Naxx without completing AQ40. We butted heads with C'Thun for four weeks, which to this day remains as one of the craziest encounters (at appropriate level of course) in-game. We killed him in the fourth week, and never set foot in AQ40 again, not even to kill the Prophet. We killed C'Thun once, and we were done with the place. And then we plowed through Naxx.

@Syl: I'd never considered the newness problem. But at the time of Naxx, WoW was a couple years old, wasn't it? My memory is getting fuzzy. But it's still an interesting thought, could a linear raiding system have been sustained with a sufficiently old (relative to launch, not player age) and broad player population?

@Kring: It's hard to imagine that these days, a raid that we want to do, but do no feel subhuman for not doing.

@Bronte: Given that there was only one kill, so not a whole lot of gear gain from it, would you agree that Naxx did not require a C'thun kill?

This is something that I think people (including myself) forget about the old linear model: it was not 100% linear. A guild could start BWL without killing Rag, though guild management issues might discourage it in some cases.

Original Naxx was introduced summer 2006, so 2 years in, yes. AQ40 was a few months earlier, depending on gate speed. if we consider TBC already hit January 2007, that was precious little time compared to what MC/BWL were given. it was a timing error indeed more than anything.

on my very average PVE server most raid guilds didn't kill Nefarian before 2006. let's imagine a scenario where the average player leveled and geared up for 3+ months (starting at very launch), then spent another 6 months in MC and another 3-6 in BWL. not uncommon back then. the moment more and more players started to catch up and farm these places, Blizzard introduced Naxx and released TBC 7 months after that.

@Klepsacovic: gear-wise no. Mentally, maybe. The first time in Naxx was before we killed C'Thun, and we killed the first two spider bosses after a little trouble. Patchwerk broke out back in the first week though, an so we went back to C'Thun to gain a psychological victory.

To date, no other encounter victory has felt that good. With the possible exception of prince Kael'thas. That fight was pure hell!

Syl, you're wrong. Raiding as it is understood in WoW didn't start in WoW, so no, it wasn't new.

We already know how it would have turned out if WoW had maintained the Vanilla model for raiding progression because the Vanilla model was copy-pasted from something already understood. The current model is the experiment.

I pretty much agree with you otherwise. Just pointing that out. It is important not to think of WoW in a vacuum. It came from somewhere.